In general, business models can involve buying merchandise and services for one price and selling it for another. In the process, sellers can incur spectacular costs marketing to prospective and existing users, leasing stores, paying employees, buying and maintaining information technology, transporting, and, most importantly, buying and managing the transfer of the merchandise itself.
These various costs require planning to be, at one level, a strategic activity. Executives set business objectives and merchandise planners derive strategies to meet them: back to basics to reduce the style count, extended assortments with additional colors and styles, or new lines of business such as health & beauty. On another level, planning is tactical and operational. The plan influences how many styles and colors a merchant will carry. It influences how distributions are planned for stores. It influences when markdowns are expected to be taken for each style and color. It also influences which stores should carry each style. Current business systems suffer from a limited ability for interaction between these two levels of planning.
In many businesses, such as retail stores, the procurement of goods is one of the key items to be planned. One of the key challenges faced by procurement monitoring is to keep track of processes, warehouse stocks and different events in the supply chain—from a purchase order with external suppliers to goods receipt in the warehouse—and react to potential problems. Optimizing the smooth flow of the procurement process will increase an enterprise's efficiency and competitiveness and determine its success.
The successful monitoring of procurement processes requires that dates in the supply chain be calculated exactly and tracked accordingly. The central calculation of dates ensures that different applications arrive at the same results, optimizing their accuracy. Monitoring the dates will allow a user to quickly gain an overview of the current procurement situation and react on time to potential delays.
A computerized method and system are needed for use with the key procurement processes in the fashion industry, from the point of view of procurement monitoring, and fashion scheduling.